Quick Specs

Editors' Review

Do you own many DVDs? Do you loan them to friends and then forget? Maybe you have VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray versions of the same movie. You need help, and not for chronic videophilia. Something to help you manage your movie collection is in order, like Personal Video Database (PVD) from Nostradamus. It's optimized for cataloging and maintaining a large movie collection. This free program's grouping and searching features make it easy to find movies, and it accepts plug-ins that can retrieve detailed information online. It even has a loan tracking feature that can help you keep track of who's got what. But of course you don't need actual DVDs to use PVD; it can just as easily catalog movies stored on your hard drive or tape or simply serve as a reference database of your favorite movies.

When you install PVD, you can deselect import plug-ins for a wide range of languages and some other options. The interface opens with the familiar left-hand navigation sidebar and main display. Creating a detailed list of your movies is surprisingly easy, thanks to a wizard that lets you import cover art, cast information, and more from the Internet Movie Database and other Web sites. We like the ease with which PVD synchs with an outside server, too, which lets you import and export compatible database files. PVD's search capabilities may be the scene-stealer, though. Among these are Advanced and Web search capabilities, including film-specific searching from the interface; scanning folders for changed paths; searching for movies removed from your hard drive; and a reindexing feature to keep searches up to date. We also like the options on the Filters tab, which make for quick views of specific categories, such as which movies have posters or which are on hard drives or removable drives. The Loans manager is a nifty extra; it lets you add regular borrowers and keep track of how long they keep borrowed items and other loggings.

Movie lovers and collectors will find plenty to like about Personal Video Database, especially its unique lending-library capabilities. As movie collections move from DVDs to HDDs, PVD will help you keep track of it all.

Publisher's Description

+

From Nostradamus:
With Personal Video Database you can catalog your movie collection fast and easy. Thought-out user interface and different database management function make it easy to create and manage big movie databases. Powerful filtering, grouping and sorting help you find movies very fast. The program is expandable with plugins. There are already plenty of plugins included with the installation that can help you retrieve movie information from different internet movie databases or other database formats. Other important features of Personal Video Database include Loan management, full Unicode support and many more.

- third party movie importing from various movie websites- themes- logs of third party plugins and scripts- rental management (I do not use this)- auto screenshot generation from movie file- great support community in forum

Cons

- scripts sometimes need to be updated due to websites changing their structure like IMDB. However, this is not to be blamed on the developer as they have no control over this. And as a free software, we cannot expect developer to constantly fix changes every few days.- UI can be confusing sometimes but works fine once you figure how to navigate. However, improvement on UI would be nice.

Summary

I have tested a lot of other video management tools. Free or commercial ones. This is even better than those commercial software. As a collector, you can see this software is created by someone who is a collector himself. The function and usability is totally awesome and catered for simplicity to use. There is not much learning curve to it if you are already used to this kind of software. The best feature I like about this is the movie importing feature from a lot of movie websites. This is one of the most under-rated movie database software that deserve more attention.

As a new user, it has not crashed on me yet (as with other reviewers). Has all the things I've been looking for. great selection of Movie images. Its really user-friendly wit a few exceptions. Seems to have a lot of option for input of movies.

Cons

Does not retrieve "full" movie summary but you can cut n paste that. does not always get the MPAA rating. the "seen/wish" buttons are confusing (rather have owned/wish). often time retrieves movie & dvd titles with diff dates - confusing.

Summary

I've decided to go with PVD one because its fairly easy to input my movie collection, easy to edit (so far), has a lot of ad-ins, has a small footprint - 10mb, and seems to have room for a varity of input/import/export features i'll likely need in the future.
Thanks PVD

This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.I have searched for several years to find an application that could automatically download and incorporate all information about any movie I own or have seen. Finally, this is the one. Once you figure the basics of how to add and edit movies to your list, it's quite simple to use. One of the great things is its ability to save as you add. No need to save or create backups every time you close the program, it's already done. I love this application and would highly recommend it to anyone.

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